Songs of Love and Longing, and Retro Sounds From ’60s On

For a wallow in obsessive love, it’s hard to top “Your Love Is Killing Me” on Sharon Van Etten’s fourth album, “Are We There” (Jagjaguwar). Its opening drumbeat echoes from deep down or far away; organ chords suggest hymnlike devotion, and a lone guitar note only illuminates the emptiness around it. As a full band surges in, Ms. Van Etten sings about a passion that not even mutilation can deter: “Break my legs so I won’t run to you/Steal my soul so I am one with you,” she sings. “You love me as you torture me.” Her voice is wide open, proudly martyred, holding back nothing. That song is only the most desperate outburst on an album full of them. Throughout “Are We There,” she explores long-term love as intimate strife: “You know me well/You show me hell,” she declares. Her long-breathed, legato phrasing is the sound of sorrowful patience, and the songs are stately but not calm. Expansive productions envelop her in guitar chords and orchestrations until she reaches “I Know,” in which she has been relegated to being “a lover on the side.” Then, she’s alone at the piano, still loyal, still longing.

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Taigen Kawabe of Bo Ningen has a voice that can be melodic or a falsetto shriek.CreditKarl Walter/Getty Images for Coachella

Bo Ningen

III

Bands that aim for the psychedelic also aim, too often, to replicate a particular vintage late-1960s sound, mimicking some well-studied equipment, settings and arrangements. Not the Japanese band Bo Ningen, which formed in London. Bo Ningen’s kind of psychedelic rock is about the power to disorient, to make the whole landscape wobble. On its third album, “III” (Stolen), the band’s vocabulary certainly includes the drones, distortion and echo effects of vintage acid rock. But Bo Ningen is the kind of band whose 1960s erudition apparently includes Captain Beefheart as well as Pink Floyd; its two guitarists have honed a rapid-fire, staggered rhythm attack that hurls the beat into a whirlpool. Bo Ningen also draws on the spasmodic rhythms and irritant vocals of hardcore and Japanese noise rock; Taigen Kawabe, Bo Ningen’s bassist and singer, has a voice that can be melodic, nasally cutting or a wild-eyed falsetto shriek. The songs on “III” encompass majestic processionals, droney space rock, whipsaw distorted funk and songs in which it’s best simply to hang on for the ride.

Here’s globalization and Internet era-hopping in action. Little Dragon is a four-member band from Gothenburg, Sweden, with a singer who grew up in Japan, Yukimi Nagano. Its music favors sparse, artificial electronic tones and angular, asymmetrical melodies, with a retro fixation on 1980s and 1990s Minneapolis funk. Little Dragon’s first three albums were rigorously stripped down, often with just a few synthesizer notes and the barest elements of a beat behind Ms. Nagano’s cryptic thoughts (in English) about romance, money and celebrity. Its new one, “Nabuma Rubberband” (Loma Vista), sounds downright plush by comparison, allowing the relative luxuries of letting notes reverberate, sustaining chords in the background and multitracking Ms. Nagano’s voice. The acknowledged influence is Janet Jackson’s slow-motion ballads (produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, from Minneapolis). But these songs evade pop’s verse-chorus-verse to build, like dance music, by accretion. And instead of Ms. Jackson’s flirtations and seductions, Ms. Nagano offers contradictions, reflections and ambivalences; “Klapp Klapp,” the album’s first single, is a rock-driven jumble of longing and confusion. Little Dragon has traded its austere electronic blueprints for 3-D renderings, making its music more approachable but no less eccentric.

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John Fullbright says more with less.CreditKate Burn

John Fullbright

SONGS

John Fullbright, a songwriter from Oklahoma, stays determinedly plain-spoken on his second studio album, starting with its title: “Songs” (Blue Dirt/Thirty Tigers). He has figured out how understatement can lend gravity to a song. Mr. Fullbright joins the lineage of terse Southwestern songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, sticking to a few folky chords and reaching for unassailable clarity: “I haven’t told myself the truth/Since the first night you were gone.” He keeps his backup spartan and rootsy, considerably less rowdy than his 2012 debut album, “From the Ground Up.” His own guitar or piano is joined by just a handful of instruments; when he wants to bring out a word, his voice adds a hint of a scratch. In the songs on “Songs,” he’s mostly a guy in love, lonely or not, but he can also spin a narrative of hard work and tragedy (in “High Road”). More than once, he mentions the power of songs themselves, making clear that he knows exactly what he’s after.

Eno and Hyde

SOMEDAY WORLD

The future is funky, fitfully optimistic and oddly familiar on “Someday World” (Warp), a collaborative album by Brian Eno and Karl Hyde of Underworld. It started with tracks Mr. Eno had shelved from a project he was calling Reikuti, mingling the steady pulse of Steve Reich’s Minimalism with the Afrobeat of Fela Anikulapo Kuti; Mr. Hyde and Mr. Eno collaborated on words and music to build them into songs. The results are far less synthetic or club oriented than might be expected. Instead, the music circles back toward what Eno was recording in the late 1970s and early 1980s on his own albums and with Talking Heads, with ever-changing chatter among guitars and keyboards and beats that bubble up and recede — particularly in the album’s peppiest song, “A Man Wakes Up,” which both describes and embodies the way sensory overload can turn into euphoria. It’s an uneven album, with stretches that were probably more fun in the studio than on replay. But in its better moments, percolating rhythms and genial vocal harmonies harbor apocalyptic thoughts, as in “Witness”: “Did you ever dream the end of the world, watching everything you love slip beneath the flood?”

Correction:

A picture credit with the Playlist CD review column on May 25, based on information from a publicist, misidentified who took the photograph of the singer-songwriter John Fullbright. It was Kate Burn, not Vicki Farmer.

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